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I love listening to my iPod. Everywhere I go, I have it plugged in - on the road, in my car, on the bus, at work; everywhere. But no matter how much I love having all of my audio/visual media right at my fingertips, there has always been one thing that has bothered me about iPods and all of their associated paraphernalia - they all look the same.

They all resemble something that Eero Saarinen carved out of a block of plastic, polished to a shine, and made available to the public. This is all well and good if you have a condo chock-full of Jetsons furniture, eschewing any and all hard lines in favor of the Apple standard of soft eggshell curved products. I, on the other hand, am a pretty typical guy and have a living space peppered with very angular, semi-broken furniture and accoutrements that make a proto-futuristic iPod docking station look a tad out of place.

Enter Tivoli’s iPAL docking station. Resembling something that would be right at home on a WWII submarine or knocking around in the jungle on a National Geographic expedition; it is the perfect addition to my jumbled, yet spartan living situation. Stacked next to my hotplate and the Zenith TV that I use as the base for my coffee table, it looks perfectly natural - like it was meant to be there. Despite its rugged and retro appearance, it offers amazing sound quality, and also comes with an AM/FM auto-tuner and a NiMH battery pack that recharges in three hours and offers 16 hours of continuous play.

While its price, at $274.04 (192.40 Euro) makes it far more expensive than any of the rest of my furniture, it still looks mighty fine sitting atop my bookshelf made of cinder-blocks and 2x4’s.